County Executive’s Corner: “We Mean Business in Rockland”

Look what happens when you make it known that Rockland is open for business

Chinese tour operators spend the day visiting and word of all that Rockland has to offer reaches back to their native land. Golden Krust Bakery, a company founded by Jamaican immigrants, moves its operations from the Bronx to Blauvelt.

Streit’s, one of the world’s leading matzo-makers, relocates from its historic headquarters in New York City’s Lower East Side to Orangeburg.

These are just a couple of the most recent accomplishments as my administration works to attract business and responsible development to Rockland. These newcomers join Green House Data in Orangeburg and Crystal Run Healthcare in West Nyack and others that are putting down roots in Rockland.

Bringing new business and investment to the county is one of the key goals of my administration along with righting our financial ship and preserving the quality of life in our beautiful county.

Attracting smart growth – businesses that bring jobs and respect the environmental and the quality of life that we enjoy in Rockland – is a win on so many levels. Those businesses help share the burden of property taxes. The more businesses pay, the smaller the bill for homeowners.

And those businesses bring jobs that can help attract new residents and provide opportunities for people who live here. Rockland’s unemployment rate is now an enviable 4 percent, among the lowest in the state.

The more jobs, the better.

Golden Krust, for example, will bring 73 new jobs when it opens its new facility on Route 303 in 2018. An additional 100 new jobs will come to the county when the company closes its Bronx facility by 2021.

And the Chinese businesspeople who spent the day in Rockland last week loved what they saw – so much that they promised to tell tourists visiting the area to spend some time here.

An influx of tourists is a boon for our restaurants and hotels, including, TIME Nyack, a new 133-room boutique hotel that’s about to open – another win for responsible economic development in Rockland. These accomplishments don’t happen by accident. It takes a lot of hard work – often behind the scenes – to woo a new company to the area or persuade an existing company to stay put.

Those 30 Chinese businesspeople, tour operators and travel writers spent the day in Rockland thanks to the efforts of Lucy Redzeposki, Rockland’s dynamic Director of Economic Growth. She organized with tour, along with the Small Business Administration, and is working to forge close ties between Rockland and Chinese tourists and business owners.

Two other Rockland organizations deserve praise for helping to bring business to the county – the Rockland County Industrial Development Agency under the leadership of Executive Director Steve Porath and the Rockland Economic Development Corporation, led by Richard Struck.

The IDA, for example, worked with Streit’s to show them potential locations and to make them aware of possible incentives for which they could apply. The REDC worked with Pearl River Pastry for several months to help the company finalize plans to open a new facility in West Nyack. That means 50 jobs will stay in Rockland and another 30 or so will be created over the next several years.

It takes a team effort to attract and retain investment in our community. Our team is spreading the word from China to Pearl River to Orangeburg and the Bronx and everywhere in between that Rockland means business.

May this be the only the beginning of much good to come to Rockland County. Perhaps Chinese and other visitors might be interested in Rockland County's significant Revolutionary War history. Perhaps it is time to elevate awareness of the significance of the Ramapo Pass as Saxby Vouler Penfold wrote about it in his book "Romantic Suffern" in 1955. (A copy is in the Suffern Free Library.):

"The Ramapo Pass has never received from historians the credit rightly due for the part it played in the War of American Independence. The records show that this cut in the Ramapo Mountains was a site of supreme strategic importance in the great struggle for American Independence; that the possession of it was the key to military supremacy in the Colonies; and the successful defense of it was of infinite importance to America.

That the Ramapo Pass is entirely lost sight of in all the published histories of the United States, is due in part to the fact that its very importance caused it to be kept secret; all military operations in connection with it were carefully concealed under various pretexts.

Historians of the War of Independence harp on Bunker Hill and make history center about it, when it really was of very small moment. The armed conflicts which took place near Boston were scarcely more than preliminary events in the greater war that followed. As soon as the rebellion was found to be no longer local, as soon as the thirteen colonies instead of one were seen to be in revolt, the scene shifted to New York, and the Ramapo Pass was the prize to be fought for."

Military correspondence of the day indicates General Washington stationed as many as 400 soldiers at a time to guard the Pass.

Some consider Suffern to be the place where New England met the rest of the colonies. Had control of the Ramapo Pass been lost, the British would have been able to separate New England from the rest of the colonies and would have had ready-supply from Canada – there could well have been a different ending to the Revolutionary War.